Yonks ago while I was still at university, veteran journo John Campbell publicly admitted he was a leftie. He’d voted for the Alliance he confessed. He was saying it because pretending the media didn’t havebias was a fraud.
I remember it because we debated it in one of my classes. Probably Media Politics 113.
Back then I thought Campbell was wrong to abandon the ideals of balance and objectivity. But now that I’ve done the job a while, I think he was bang on.
I mention this because Jeff Bezos could probably do with learning a bit from JC.
Jeff Bezos has made a total cluster this week of handling the newspaper he is so proud of owning, writes Heather du Plessis-Allan. Photo / Getty Images
Bezos has made a total cluster this week of handling the newspaper he is so proud of owning: The Washington Post.
WaPo was planning to do what so many papers in the US do and endorse a candidate for President. No surprise, it would be Kamala Harris.
Bezos nixed the idea at the last minute. Staff quit in protest. 250,000 readers (at last count) cancelled their subscriptions.
He tried to defend himself. It was a semi-plausible argument. Trust in media is eroding, he argued, because people think the media are biased and endorsements create a perception of bias.
Semi-plausible, but also BS.
Presidential endorsements don’t create a bias perception. It’s everything the outlet does that creates that perception.
We don’t do endorsements in New Zealand and yet we have a media-bias-perception problem.
The bias is obvious in the stories an outlet hammers. Media that chose to go harder on National’s Andrew Bayly for his “loser” joke than on Labour’s Ginny Andersen for her King’s crotch joke can expect to be considered biased against the Government.
The bias is in the angles they take on the same issue. Media arguing for a capital gains tax will be seen as left; those arguing against a CGT will be seen as right.
It’s in the choice of words, the disclaimers apologising for publishing “diverse” ranges of opinion when they only ever apologise for publishing certain types of opinion, in the sprinkling of te reo throughout the English transcript.
Every single media outlet in NZ has a lean one way or the other. That isn’t necessarily a problem. The problem is when those outlets pretend they don’t have a bias. That’s what causes trust to decline. Because everyone can see the thing they’re denying.
Endorsements like WaPo planned are probably one of the most honest things media outlets can do. If Bezos really cared about trust, he would have let the paper be truthful about its preference instead of trying to hide it.
The other thing that really knocks confidence is the suspicion that media self-censor. Social media went bananas when one prominent NZ news boss told a podcast that senior news people had considered sticking together and not reporting some Winston Peters comments at the last election. The public suspected that the media deliberately refrained during the big Covid vaccine campaign from being completely upfront that, yes, there could be complications from the jab. Most vaccines carry a small risk. But we just couldn’t say that out loud for this jab, this time around.
That stuff erodes trust.
Bezos has just fallen into exactly the same trap. He’s self-censored his outlet and been caught doing it.
I don’t know that he really does care about media bias. Maybe that’s just a convenient excuse for what he did. Maybe he’s just a successful businessman wanting to stay on the right side of Donald Trump who might actually win in three days.
If Bezos really wants to help sort out falling trust in the media, he should learn from JC and just be honest. His paper prefers Kamala Harris.
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